Should students get community service hours for technical work?

Every year my school performs a large musical like My Fair Lady. Every year five or six students work on the technical theater part of the performance. They run lights, spotlights, sound, and stagecrew with no monatary compensation. In previous years, the students have been awarded community service hours, a requirement for graduation with rewards for excess hours, because the students recieved no public recognition. This year parents, who were univolved in the musical, raised a commotion and the ranking officials ruled that the technical theater could not recieve community service hours for their work. The students learned of this decision with less than a month until the performance. Without the students the school would be forced to hire an adult to run the technology or rely on teachers that barely know the system. Unfortunately with so little time before the show, the students had to run the tech this year or leave friends and good teachers with a musical with no sound or lighting.
As the new year comes up, I want to see if I am being selfish in demanding the benefit returned, or if my case has some marit. [/u]

Is this an IB school?
If so - and the community service requirement you're referring to is the Service aspect of CAS - then yes, I'd agree that students should get Service credit for what they do. At my school, some of the tech crew even managed to get Creativity or Action credit (depending on the specific jobs they were doing) for their time...

If it isn't an IB school, the above probably didn't make sense. But if students involved in tech are putting in a fair amount of their time to put on a successful show, they receive no other compensation for this work, and community service hours are a graduation requirement - I'd think, by all means, they deserve credit!

The students acting in the play do not recieve community service hours, instead they get mentioned in all the stories and histories of the presentation. Everyone involved in the performance does get a T-shirt.

I have no idea what IB is so I would guess that the school is not (although I would like a brief translation of the acronyms you used). The school requires 24 hours of community service to graduate with a plaque and banquet for over 100 hours. On average, each play involves 60 hours of work in the span of two weeks.

the problem here is one of entitlement... if the students acting in the plays, who put just as much time into it as you do, don't get hours, then why should the techies? are you doing it for public praise, or are you doing it because you enjoy it and it builds good skills? why do you feel like the school *ought* to give you community hours?

The original idea was to give the students some recongition because the students recieved nothing (this changed). Now it is more a matter of the students performing an essential service for free for a service that could be charging 25-75 dollars an hour. I will not deny that the techies do this for fun. However, taking away the main insentive for learning to run tech makes it very hard to find a replacement in a system that needs new people every three years.

Mongoose42 wrote:I have no idea what IB is so I would guess that the school is not (although I would like a brief translation of the acronyms you used).

IB stands for International Baccalaureate.
The high school I graduated from had students follow the IB Diploma Programme in their last 2 years, and one of the requirements to get the Diploma (i.e. to graduate at all!) was something called CAS.

CAS stands for Creativity-Action-Service. Basically, over the 2 years, each student has to participate in at least 150 hours of extracurricular activities (for which they receive no monetary compensation) - 50 hours for each component of CAS. In a nutshell:
Creativity, aside from the obvious (artistic pursuits), includes activities like debating, business club, etc
Action has you getting physically active (e.g. sports)
Service has you serving your community in some way
(As you can see, there is some overlap here - e.g. dance could be both Creativity and Action. Indeed, in some circumstances it could even count as Service - like if someone gives a dance performance at a charity fundraising event.)

Anyway, IB is a very demanding programme, and many students were really struggling to meet the CAS requirement on top of their studies and other responsibilities. So people would write off their activities creatively - for instance, seeking Action credit for tech work ("we were moving heavy set props around between scenes!") where Service might have seemed more appropriate for the activity. It was all about whether you could convince the CAS coordinator, really...